Castle grave of nice – the incredible beauty of the churchyard, which lies on the ruins of the ancient citadel, on the Castle hill. Sea and city remain at the bottom, there is silence, and over the graves stretches the deep sky.

Until the end of the eighteenth century in Sardinia, the predecessor of Italy, it was customary to bury the dead in churches. In 1783 the king Victor Amadeus II forbade such burial, and nice, were at that time in the Kingdom, looking for places for cemeteries. One of them was a wasteland on the Castle hill with the ruins of an ancient fortress. In his time here stood one of the most powerful in the Mediterranean strongholds, even withstood the siege of the allied forces of the French king Francis the First and Sultan Suleiman the Magnificent. However, the Sun King Louis XIV, laying siege to the castle in 1706, turned it into ruins.

The cemetery is located on the place where he was part of the citadel, rebuilt in the XVI century. Here are preserved remains of the walls of the fortress, which is now supporting the construction of terraces on which rest the grave. It offers breathtaking views of the city, sea and surrounding mountains.

A feature of the cemetery is its confessional: it found a final resting place of the Catholic, Protestant, Orthodox, on the South side is the Jewish part (it is a Cenotaph in memory of the natives of nice – the victims of the Holocaust). Impressive architectural appearance of the cemetery: the oldest tombstones are made in the neoclassical style reminiscent of Roman sarcophagi, Dating to the neo-Gothic chapel and in the Ligurian spirit, lots of busts. Magnificent sculptures, elegant tombs make Castle cemetery one of the most beautiful in Europe.

Here are buried many famous people. On the Castle hill lies the dust of Alexander Herzen on a stone pedestal stands a bronze statue of the Russian revolutionary, writer and philosopher. Near his grave, buried the great French Republican Leon Gambetta. Here is the mother a native of nice Giuseppe Garibaldi Rosa Raimondi, founder of the brand "Mercedes" Emil Jellinek, the daughter of Henri Matisse Margarita, writer Gaston Leroux.

2800 graves make up this city of the dead. At its entrance is erected a pyramidal memorial in memory of two victims of the fire at the Opera of nice in 1881. Built in 1935 by architect françois Aragon the chapel of the Holy Trinity, you can place a candle and pray for the souls of those buried on a high hill.